Thanks for the shares and likes, but how many of you are actually reading this article?
According to a study by Columbia University and the French National Institute, only two out of five people will click through and read the story from links on social media.
The other three will share the story to their friends and followers without having ever read the story.
The study looked at five major news outlet’s Twitter pages in the course of a month last summer, and found that while the posts had a combined 2.8 million shares, reaching 75 billion people, there were only about 9.6 million actual clicks.
“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” Arnaud Legout, the study’s co-author, said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”
He pointed out that “sharing content and actually reading it are poorly correlated.”
A person’s proclivity to share without reading, can lead to embarrassing cases, especially if you’re a presidential nominee with an active Twitter page.
It could be the reason why Donald Trump tweeted “THANK YOU!” with a One America News Network photo showing him losing in the polls to Hillary Clinton on Friday.
Or when his supporters made a photo of an “Evil Dead” actress go viral by claiming it was a Trump supporter violently attacked by liberals.
The billionaire has also shared questionable “crime statistics” that were later completely debunked.
The study also found that the majority of posts that go viral aren’t from the news outlet themselves, but crowd-curated, shared by readers that might not have even read the story.
If you have gotten to this part of the article, feel free to join the minority of people who’ve actually read the articles and shared it.